Tag: MP3

Apple iPod Mini

I’m not exactly the biggest Apple booster, but I have to say I am genuinely impressed by the iPod Mini.

Much of the criticism of the product seems to be a) that it’s expensive (umm, it’s an Apple product, WTF did you expect?) and b) that it’s not that much smaller than the iPod.

I don’t understand either of those arguments, although that’s probably because I’m right in the target market that Apple’s trying to hit. For the past few years I’ve been usingFrontier Labs excellent Nex IIe Compact Flash-based MP3 player. It’s small, extremely light weight and works like a charm.

The main drawback is, of course, Compact Flash is still expensive in comparison to hard drives. So my big decision is to either a) buy a 1 gb CF card for about $240 or b) buy something like the 4gb Mini iPod for $249. Hmmm…that’s not exactly a hard choice to make.

Yes, it’s still expensive compared to other HD-based MP3 players, but if you’re like me and carry around numerous gadgets everywhere you go, then every ounce counts.

Whether or not there are enough gadget freaks like me to make the Mini iPod a hit remains to be seen, but I’m sold.

RioVolt Review

I’d already read a number of very positive reviews of the RioVolt MP3 player, so when I happened across one in Best Buy the other day, I grabbed it on impulse. For the most part, the RioVolt lives up to the hype.

Unlike MP3 players that rely on flash memory, the RioVolt plays CDs burned with MP3s (it can also play regular CDs as well). Unlike some of the first MP3 CD players, the RioVolt makes it relatively easy to navigate through a CD that might contain hundreds of songs.

The big advantage it has over something like Philips Expanium MP3 CD player is that the RioVolt can recognize and display ID3 tags which means that when you’re navigating a subdirectory you see something like “U2 – Beautiful Day” rather than “Directory 3 – Track 5.” Currently the RioVolt supports up to 999 tracks on a single CD. The navigation buttons are relatively straightforward and navigating through CDs with hundreds of MP3s is easy.

I burned several different CDs containing MP3s encoded at 128kbs through 320 kbs, and the RioVolt handled them fine. The one disappointment I had on playback was that the much-touted skip protection wasn’t really that effective. I had no problem making the player skip routinely at even low encoding rates.

The buttons on the unit and the included remote control are also extremely sensitive. A number of times I was listening to music with the unit in my coat pocket when slight pressure on the exterior of the coat caused the unit’s Pause or Stop buttons to engage. RioVolt has the standard “Hold” switch feature, so there is a workaround.

The player’s software is also upgradeable. Just copy the latest firmware release off the RioVolt web site, burn it as the only file on a CD-R, put it in the player and turn it on.

Battery life is excellent. It’s rated to play for about 15 hours on two AA batteries. I didn’t actually test the unit to see how long it would last before going dead, but my rechargeables were still going strong after 10 hours of use.

At only $170, as long as you’ve got a computer with a CD-R/W drive and are comfortable burning MP3 CDs, at the moment the RioVolt offers what I think is the best combination of features at a reasonable price.

Microsoft Out to Kill MP3?

A ZDNET article outlines Microsoft’s attempts to kill the MP3 format. Apparently Microsoft is shipping an MP3 encoder with Windows XP but limits the encoding to just 56kb/s. OTOH you can encode music in Microsoft’s proprietary format with all the quality you want, but then the user has to deal with digital rights management bugs.

According to ZDNET, most of the people they talked to expect MP3 to be around for a long time to come but,

Still, experts said Microsoft’s increasingly aggressive efforts to popularize its proprietary audio format–along with legal difficulties facing Napster–could stem MP3’s popularity. They cite Microsoft’s vast resources and the broad reach of its Windows operating system. Microsoft, for example, has been giving away free licenses to other companies to use its audio technology, which now is supported–along with MP3–by major hand-held music players.

Here’s what I think: most digitial rights management schemes are horrible simply from an end user experience. Sure DRM is being built into some handhelds, but even computer savvy reviewers are finding the almost impossible to use and slower than molasses (Sony and Pioneer, for example, both have DRM-enabled players where the time required to encode an MP3 song into a DRM version and then transfer that song onto the player often exceeds the playing length of the song — which just won’t cut it).

If electronics manufacturers ever get together and come up with a single, easy to use, fast, unbreakable DRM system then we’re in trouble, but I just don’t see that happening — these are the same folks, after all, who can’t even agree on standards for the next generation of CD/DVD audio.

My.MP3.Com Returns, But With Too Many Drawbacks

On the one hand you have to admire the folks at MP3.Com. They took a huge gamble that a court would find their service to be covered by Fair Use provisions of copyright law. On the other hand, since they lost that gamble they have had to cripple their My.MP3.Com service to the point where I doubt they have a successful business model.

My.MP3.Com will return soon according to a New York Times report. Unfortunately there are two problems.

The first is that the service will now charge $49.95 a year for people to essentially listen to CDs they already own over a streaming connection anywhere in the world. I have no idea if people will pay that much for such a service, but it’s possible.

Unfortunately, the service has a second requirement that pretty much ruins its usefulness according to the NYT.

To deter users from borrowing CD’s that they have not purchased to store in their MP3.com “locker,” a small number of the CD’s will have to be reinserted at certain intervals, according to a record company executive.

What is the point of having a service where I can listen to my CDs anywhere without needing them if I’m going to be regularly prompted to insert those very CDs wherever I am to prove I really own them? I want my CDs in MP3 format preicesly so I don’t have to go rooting through my CD cases looking for that one CD that I really want to listen to now. If MP3.Com is going to make me randomly insert one of my CDs, I might just as well carry my CDs with me (within reason) and listen to them on my $50 portable CD player which won’t require me to renew my subscription at the end of the year.

Finally, MP3.Com CEO Michael Robertson has jumped on the “market information about the users” bandwagon. He tells the NYT, “Who has ever had the e-mail addresses of a million Madonna fans? Nobody.”

I am one of those million Madonna fans and the last thing I want is Robertson or some record company hack trying to directed targeted advertising at me.

Philips eXpanium vs. Creative Nomad Jukebox

    In the next couple days, I’m going to buy a portable MP3 player. Currently I’m leaning in the direction of Pioneer’s eXpanium MP3CD player. I really prefer to encode my MP3s at 256kbs rather than 128kbs, so the flash memory-based MP3 players are out of the question. I like the eXpanium’s ability to play both MP3 CD-Rs and regular CDs — the only real drawback I’ve read about is the inability of the eXpanium to display the MP3 ID tags in its LCD screen. That sucks, but still its a pretty good unit for $200 (and the only such unit on the market today, to my knowledge, that doesn’t max out at 192kbs).

    Another MP3 player that’s been getting a lot of good press is the Nomad Jukebox from Creative Labs. This is basically a 6 gig. hard drive in a portable CD-player style body. It’s a lot more than the Expanium at $500, but my real concern is how well it would hold up under serious use. Most reviewers say it doesn’t have too many problems with skipping, but I have serious questions about how long a hard drive-based mechanism can stand say a daily 3-5 mile run. I’ve had enough problems with hard drives going flaky that were in gingerly-treatedy laptops; unless they’ve got some serious technology I don’t know about, I’d think this thing would be toast within 6 months given the way I’d probably use and abuse it.